Pierre Montale grew up in northern France in a household with close ties to the beauty trade — his mother ran a beauty salon, and his half-sister, who launched the fragrance brand Comptoir Sud Pacifique in the mid-1970s, gave him an early window into the perfume business. That family exposure to scent-making set the direction for the rest of his career.

Long before he put his name on a bottle, Montale spent time in Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf, where he was drawn into the region's fragrance traditions and worked on bespoke compositions connected to the Saudi royal family. It was there that he became fixated on oud (agarwood), a material that was still largely unfamiliar to Western perfume buyers at the time.

In 2003 he returned to Paris and opened Maison Montale, built almost entirely around high-concentration natural materials — oud chief among them, alongside Damask and Bulgarian rose, saffron, frankincense, amber, and sandalwood. The house is widely credited as one of the first Paris niche labels to bring genuine, full-strength oud to a mainstream Western audience, with Black Aoud becoming its best-known signature.

In 2008 he founded a second, separate niche house, Mancera, which now operates alongside Montale under its own creative direction — with his daughter Amélie Montale taking an increasingly prominent role in the family business. Montale himself has kept a low public profile over the years, letting the fragrances carry the house's identity.